Apologies for the week of blog silence here. I was otherwise engaged: the page proofs for Dreaming in Code landed on my doorstep right before the holiday weekend, so that was my Labor Day weekend, and the evenings since.

It is a strange — and, I have to admit, wonderful — feeling to see this project, which I first conceived in the fall of 2002, near completion. From vague notion to typeset pages — in only four years! (The official publication date is Jan. 16, 2007.) Next up: bound galleys… blurbs… then books!

Now my energy turns from the page to the Web, where I will be building out the book’s site, at present mostly a placeholder, with excerpts and more. Here on this blog, I’m also planning to start a new project around the book’s theme — the mysterious difficulties of creating software — that I’ll be announcing soon. I don’t mean to be mysterious; there are just some details to be worked out between me, my blog and Salon.

In the course of seeing my 100,000-or-so words transformed from a Word document (it’s what the publishers want!) to a typeset galley, I’ve learned a bit more about what goes into making the text of a book look good and fit right. (My editor and the Crown designers did a great job with Dreaming in Code.) So when I recently stumbled on this blog by a book designer — addressing the realms of typography, castoffs and such — I took note. Fascinating stuff if the extent of your knowledge of publishing design is, like mine, drawn primarily from the newspaper world and the computer desktop.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Dreaming in Code, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.